Too Hard to Pronounce

Which is better motivation ...

2009-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

06 November 2009

Which is better motivation? People betting against you or betting on you?

Discuss amongst yourselves. :)

The Journalist's Dilemma

2009-11-04T00:00:00-08:00

Part 1: The Medium is the Message

04 November 2009

The first in a several part series on “Journalism and the Web”

Introduction

As the Web becomes the dominant medium, the avenues by which news has traditionally been delivered are becoming less and less relevant. Unfortunately, the energy and tactics required for a news organization to fully exploit the Web as a medium for news are often viewed with suspicion. If your livelihood is based on people paying for printed copies of your words, it’s a rather terrifying prospect to put those words online where anyone can view and reproduce them at no charge.

In short, print journalists and news organizations today face a dilemma — the same one faced by almost any entrenched business in a changing market.¹ News organizations that want to take advantage of the Web will find that they need to sacrifice or cannibalize some of their tried and true revenue streams. The dilemma is whether or not to stick with the tactics that have historically made them rich or take counter-intuitive actions based on the hope that they will pay off in the long-term.

The silver lining of this cloud for the news organizations is that this dilemma is becoming less and less of a dilemma as days go by; clearly the old revenue streams are dying off and these organizations must change if they have any hope of survival.

If we take for granted the fact that hedging bets will not be enough and smart news organizations must jump in with both feet to take advantage of the web, how should they do it?

“The Medium is The Message”

When McLuhan made this famous statement in 1964, he recognized that the shape of a given medium has a profound effect on the perception that the audience has of the content being carried.² This rings especially true now as news organizations compete with Web-native publications such as blogs for readership and ad revenue.

There is an impedance mismatch between the business and operational models of classical print journalism and the social norms and technical capabilities of the Web. This mismatch leads to suboptimal performance by the Web properties of news organizations and disappointment of readers.

Leveraging the web optimally requires an embrace of the medium’s core characteristics. What do we know about the Web?

Decentralized
Open
Programmable
Linked
Embraces emergent behavior
Rewards authority and reputation
Standardized
Distributable
Immediate, infinite context is Available

The standard practice of throwing print articles to the Web with a few formatting changes and a couple links is insufficient to align the content with the Web medium.

We’ll revisit these properties later in the series. Before we tackle this alignment of content and medium, there are more fundamental business questions that news organizations need to answer. In particular:

What do news organizations produce?
Where does the journalist add value?
Are news organizations in a product business or a service business?

These and other questions will be discussed in the next post.

¹ See Clayton M. Christensen’s seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma for an in-depth discussion of this general phenomenon. (HarperCollins, NY 2003 ISBN 0-06-052199-6)

² See Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1st Ed. McGraw Hill, NY; reissued MIT Press, 1994, with introduction by Lewis H. Lapham; reissued by Gingko Press, 2003 ISBN 1-58423-073-8

Pius Uzamere is a computer scientist and the founder of a startup, Quotation.WS, whose vision is to improve journalism by making use of the inherent properties of the Web.

On Haml and jQuery

2009-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

03 May 2009

Someone recently posted a polemic on Hacker News deriding Haml. The author slammed it for being unnecessary abstraction.

Well, that was me until about the 3rd time I played around with Haml. Then it occurred to me how much noise I got rid of by using it, after which I was hooked, especially since I use jQuery quite a bit. jQuery + Haml is a very close impedance match and a real pleasure to use for development.

Take the following Haml that defines a div with an id of “foo” along with a span with class “bar” and content “Hello World”:

  #foo
  %span.bar Hello World

If I wanted to hide those elements, I’d write the following jQuery in a separate file:

  $('#foo').hide();
  $('span.bar').hide();
  $('#foo').hide();

  $('span.bar').hide();



That’s really powerful stuff. The Haml syntax for defining elements looks exactly like the CSS3-style selectors used by jQuery, so much so that I often cut and paste my Haml markup into my javascript files.

The Hard Hat Mentality

2009-04-27T00:00:00-07:00

27 April 2009

Recently on Hacker News, someone asked how to fight procrastination.

My advice isn’t for procrastination in general (e.g. putting off paying bills or mowing the lawn), but for that special kind of procrastination that stops you from getting a business or important project going.

Read “The War of Art” by Steven Pressman and internalize its message. You can finish it in a day. In a nutshell, the book describes procrastination and some other vices as embodiments of Resistance, an evil spirit that plagues anyone who tries to do anything worthwhile.

The strategy Pressman outlines for fighting Resistance dovetails nicely with the techniques described in the other book I’d recommend, which is “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp. With respect to procrastination, Tharp talks about recognizing (1) that creative work is still work and (2) the importance of developing solid daily routines and rituals so that you stop treating your work as something you do only when you’re “inspired.” She more or less adds details to the Pressman’s description of the “hard hat mentality” necessary to get anything done.

The hard hat mentality is that you don’t procrastinate on your job or wait until you “want” to do it, you just put the hard hat on every day and do the work so that you can get paid (whatever “paid” means for you). You’re doing it not because you’re inspired or motivated; you’re doing it because it’s your job. Period.

The Obama Mystique

2009-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

21 April 2009

Recently on Hacker News, someone posted an L.A. Times article and editorialized a new title for it “The Obamas’ Image is Carefully Tailored.” As if this were cause for scandal.

The sad reality is that his family’s image had to be carefully managed order for Obama’s presidency to become a reality. It would have been very difficult for anything less than Huxtable-like perfection to keep the Obamas palatable to middle America. Even with the Obama family’s nearly sterling image, Obama smears still got some traction in the sticks amongst those who think he’s some sort of sinister, un-American, terrorist fist-jabbing secret Muslim who’s not even an American citizen.

I guarantee you that if the Obamas looked like a black version of the Palin family (with questionable intellectual pedigree, teenage pregnancy, an uneducated spouse in a radical secessionist party, and close in-laws with predicate felonies and drug problems), the electorate would not have let Barack Obama anywhere near a major party nomination, let alone the presidency.

Ruby vs. C#

2009-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

02 April 2009

Suppose you wanted to print the numbers from 1 to 10 in C#. No big deal:

  public static class IntExtensions {
      public static List<int> UpTo(this int start, int end) {
          var range = new List<int>();
          for(int i = start; i < end; i++) {
              range.Add(i);
          }
          return range;
      }
  }
  
  (1).UpTo(10).ForEach(x => Console.WriteLine(x));

So, what does the Ruby look like?

  p *1..10

Ahem.

Barely Releasable

2008-09-19T00:00:00-07:00

September 26, 2008

The “Getting Real” methodology that 37signals uses for their software has resonated with me for quite some time, though it took me a little while before I actually began putting it into practice. Because they make money from the talks and books they sell on the methodology, they often find new ways to reframe the advice. The language Jason Fried used at the recent Web 2.0 Expo really struck a chord with me:

“You want to cut your feature set until you’ve got software that you’d think is just barely releasable”

One hard-to-overcome mental barrier I’ve had to the whole “less software” idea is the visceral, nagging sense that if I release a really lean piece of software, it won’t make the impact that it should on the market. Ultimately, I only want to release that which I consider “releasable.” The mindset of striving for “barely releasable” releases is one that I can definitely relate to in order to get those rapid iterations out the door, rather than holding onto things too long.